Question

Your company runs BigQuery in the Enterprise edition with a single reservation of 1,000 baseline slots assigned to a production project for scheduled ETL. During overnight batch windows the ETL reservation is fully utilized, but during the day it sits nearly idle while a separate ad-hoc analytics project (currently on-demand billing) generates unpredictable, spiky query costs. Leadership wants to reduce overall cost and improve slot utilization without degrading the ETL SLA. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Move the analytics project into the same reservation, enable idle slot sharing on the reservation, and configure autoscaling so peak demand above the baseline is met by scaled slots.

Answer

Create a second reservation with 1,000 baseline slots for the analytics project and disable idle slot sharing on both reservations to guarantee isolation.

Answer

Keep the analytics project on on-demand pricing and lower the ETL reservation baseline to 200 slots to save money during the day.

Answer

Purchase a three-year capacity commitment for 2,000 slots and assign all projects to a single reservation without autoscaling.